SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud Edition is hosted in the SAP public cloud. It is a limited version of the on-premise solution offered as a classical Software-as-a-service model: to use the software, customers pay monthly subscription fees. The deployment is also faster and more simple than the on-prem edition. Since SAP hosts the software, the customers do not have to worry about servers and infrastructure management. The same goes for updates: they happen every six months and don't require much preparation from the customer's side.
With this approach, customers can save on the internal IT team to maintain and manage the solution. But the downside is the need for more flexibility: the solution focuses on the key processes only, has a limited choice of settings, and only allows a few customizations.
S/4HANA public cloud edition targets middle-size companies looking for a light and flexible database platform that would allow them to scale. The solution also addresses the challenges of the professional services industry (consulting, accounting, IT services, etc.) – no other ERP platforms from SAP include best practice scenarios for this line of business.
Since the software is hosted in the SAP cloud, you can save on infrastructure and hardware management resources.
The deployment takes about 3-6 months and requires less resources and preparation than the on-premise edition. Updates are released every six months, and the process is generally simpler than the updates of the on-premise edition.
With S/4HANA Public Cloud Edition, you gain access to the best practices from dozens of lines of businesses. There is no need to reinvent the wheel and build all these processes from scratch: rely on what proved to be perfectly working!
Need more system users than before? Or, on the opposite, your business has grown, and you need more licenses? With the S/4HANA Public Cloud edition, you can easily scale your system and pay only for what you use.